Get to Know Your Fantasy Football Formats: Auction League

Has your fantasy home league gotten stale? Are you looking for a way to spice it up and reignite that excitement? Maybe a fantasy football auction league is exactly what you need. An auction draft is one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever done in fantasy football, and it’s even better live. It’s not for the faint of heart or unprepared, though. So before you get into your first auction draft, let’s Get to Know Your Fantasy Football Format: Auction League.

Breakdown

An auction league operates no different than your typical fantasy football league. The only thing that changes is the draft. Instead of the standard linear or snake draft to choose your players, you do an auction. The standard snake draft can leave much to be desired; it’s boring and leaves you at the mercy of which pick you get randomly. The benefit of an auction draft is that every player is available to every manager. You have to want them more and outbid your league mates.

How An Auction League Works

It’s simple. A draft order is still drawn like a standard snake draft, but this is the nomination order, not the draft order. The person who gets to go first will get the pleasure of nominating the first player. Each manager gets a set budget – typically $100 or $200 – and that’s all they get to draft their players. When the first player is nominated, each manager gets to bid whatever they want for the duration of that player’s auction, usually about one minute per player. The bids must be increased by a minimum of $1 every time you choose to outbid someone. This process goes on, one nomination at a time, until each team has filled out their entire lineup.

What’s the Catch?

As stated above, each team gets a set amount of money. If you overpay for players early, you will be strapped for cash later. The other thing to consider is that you must make a minimum bid of $1 to win a player. So at all times, you must have the amount of money left to fill out your roster. For example, if you have six empty roster spots, the site won’t allow you to fall under $6 remaining, which limits your max bid.

Rosters

Rosters are open to league preference. They can be 1QB, Superflex, IDP or whatever you and your league mates desire. The format has no impact on roster settings. Rather, the roster settings will impact the auction. Much like in a standard snake draft, a Superflex league can greatly impact an auction league.

A quarterback that could go for $40 in 1QB leagues, could go for $100 in Superflex. This could leave you stuck with the choice of either paying up for a quarterback or piecing things together with cheaper options.

Waivers

Each team will receive a fixed amount of FAAB for the year. Some fantasy football leagues choose to add any money you had left over from the startup draft to your FAAB totals. This can add an interesting level of strategy. Otherwise, waivers operate as in standard leagues.

Scoring

Again, scoring is not impacted by the auction, but can instead impact the auction. Tight end premium scoring, for example, can lead to managers paying a hefty premium for the Travis Kelce’s of the world. These score settings can lead you to alter your strategy in the auction.

Consensus Strategies

This is where it gets interesting. No two managers approach an auction league alike. I will give you several different tactics and strategies that can be applied. You can decide for yourself which you will implement.

• Studs & Duds: This is perhaps the most common strategy. Many managers will pay up for a handful of studs and then sit by and wait until the end of the draft where they can fill out their roster with depth players in the $1-5 range.
• Pay Attention to Opponents Needs: Be opportunistic. If you look at the other teams and they all need a tight end, that’s not the time to try and sneak in a bargain tight end. Conversely, if you already have your tight end, it could be a good time to let the other managers fight over one that you don’t want or need anyway.
• Allocate Your Budget: Take a look at your roster and scoring settings and use that to determine what percentage of your budget you wish to spend on each position. This can be very different based on rosters and scoring. For example, in a 1QB league, I typically spend about 5% on my quarterback. Whereas, in a Superflex league, it’s much closer to 50% on quarterbacks.
• Know Your League Mates: This can often give you an advantage. If you’re in a home league full of Dallas Cowboys fans, nominate some Cowboys early to force your league mates to waste their money. Conversely, if there is a certain Cowboys player that you want, consider waiting until people are low on money to nominate them.
• Nominate Over-Valued Players Early: Many managers will choose to use their early nominations on overhyped players that they aren’t all that interested in. This can often create an early feeding frenzy and cause managers to burn through precious money on players you didn’t want anyway.

Personal Strategies

• Kickers & DSTs: This is a personal strategy. In a $100 auction. I never spend more than $1 on your kicker or DST. Instead, I use my early nominations for those positions. The end result is that I either get myself a top kicker and DST for $1, or I force someone to overspend on a useless position. I can’t count how many times this season I have done this and see managers bid for Justin Tucker or the 49ers DST up to $7. Yes, they are both great assets to have, but wasting $7 of a $100 budget on them is a horrible idea. This strategy puts you in a win-win situation.
• Stick to Your Values: Find yourself a trusted source that does auction values and download their spreadsheet. My personal favorite is over at PlayerProfiler. Their Draft Kit has World Class Auction Values. From there, it’s simple. Do not go over the value you have assigned to each player, especially early on. At the beginning of auction drafts, I will bid on essentially every player. I will typically throw out a bid of 75% of my max value for that player and if I get them at a 25% discount, bonus. Often, I get to the halfway point in an auction and will have a handful of great values on big-name stars. I also find that my bid criteria serves as price enforcement to ensure no other managers get any significant discounts.
• Draft Values Not Players: This piggybacks on the previous strategy. In fantasy football auction drafts, I have no players that I like or dislike, merely players that I get at a value or pass on at cost. I stick rigidly to my value sheet and very rarely stray. This often leaves me with rosters full of undervalued players that other people passed on.
• Use Tier-Based Drafting: This lets me know when it’s time to overpay. If TE10 is my cut-off line between the tier of start-able tight ends and the abyss, that’s my tier break. I know that I can stick to my value chart on the position. But once I get to the point where I’m starting to come to the end of my tier, I know it’s time to get more aggressive and potentially overspend before I get stuck with an unusable player.
• Don’t Over Spend: I find 90% of my auction drafts play out the same way. I miss most of the elite players, snagging only one or two that went undervalued. Instead, I get to the middle of the draft and load up on solid options at a significant discount. Many managers go with “Studs & Duds”, but not me. My team may not have an RB1 or WR1, but it will have four RB2s and WR2s.

This is perhaps my favorite format of all in fantasy football. It takes considerably longer than a standard snake draft and usually lasts around four hours. If you can manage to get a live auction draft going, it’s likely the most fun you will ever have in fantasy football.

I must caution you though: Live auction drafts aren’t like your standard online snake drafts. You can’t fake your way through it. There is no ADP list and you have to know your stuff. It’s a ton of work, but well worth it in the end when your league mates can marvel at the shrewd lineup you managed to put together.

If you would like to check out our full list of staff rankings for the 2023 NFL season, check out our rankings page at www.theleaguewinners.com.